k-prizzy took me on errands yesterday, the first week of a regular deal by which she takes me on errands every tuesday and i buy her lunch. it was heavenly. full disclosure: i can’t drive.

we went to:

• economy paint

  mis-tints are your best value, but maybe i got the not-perfect color for the chroma key screen i’m installing in the shop. “oh well”.

• micheal’s in white city

  there’s usually some cool artsy girl archetype working but there wasn’t yesterday. they always ask for my zip code and i always say “90120″, which is, i think, a perfect response, because it’s good to resist or at least question the constant harvesting of personal data, but if you say “no, you can’t have my zip code”, then it’s a big production. giving obvious false information is great because it’s points out that it totally doesn’t matter, and you show distain for the system, but it’s light and fun, and at a person to person level, really no one cares. the last time i was at michael’s the lady (who was the archetype) said “really?” and i told her “hey, everyone lives in hollywood nowadays”. let’s you say that 90210 is actually beverly hills, let’s me say that the idea “beverly hills” exists in the idea “hollywood”.

  micheal’s is in the same plaza as the 24 hour dunkin donuts, which is a really good scene, and the bodybuilder burrito store with the tribal tat menus. there’s also an “iParty”, which is a funny name for something that has nothing to do with computers. it’s just plastic animals that you can put in your pocket. actually i’ve never done this but i always think about it.

• the dumb supermarket

  the trick to supermarkets is to only buy things from the periphery- produce, dairy, bread. everything in the middle is a vast wasteland of vast waistbands. although it’s always worth it to go to the cereal aisle and treat it like an art gallery (and for this the best supermarket is the price hopper, which has really good generic brands with good stupid names). the shaws at white city (possibly all shaw’ses) redesigned to compete with the trader joe’s across the way and now has a few “mini sstores” inside the larger stores, where they parse out “natural” and “ethnic” foods from the stock and display them in areas separate from everything else, with particular lighting and design elements (wood grain vinyl floors in the “natural” section is particularly appropriate). maybe it works, but when you’re trying to compare prices and four different cans of black beans are in “natural”, “ethnic >> latin american” “foods of the world >> mexico”, and “miscellaneous”, come on.

• dollar forever

  dollar stores have the best names, even though this one is patently false– more than a year ago they changed to a “dollar and up” store. hmmph! anyway, they have the best dvds, which are so cheap to make that tons of movies that never saw a video release are getting dumped on the market at a phenominal rate. lots of kung fu, spanish-language singing westerns, really old cartoons, and old sci-fi horror. perfect! yesterday i got a luchador / robot movie with a totally totally 100% bananas “rock” sequence by a band called “shadow of the beast”. it looks like they were recording a bunch of nonsense just to drop a tite instrumental over in post, then forgot. everybody’s waving everything around for two minutes, then ssomehow it really falls to shit, and you hear someone in the background say (in english) “stop the rock!”. almost everyone drops out, then the drummer says in a vincent price voice (again, in english) “when the music changes… SO DO I!” and things get way wiggy again fast. definitely worth $1.05! i forget what the movie was called but i remember fake translating the title as “lunch with the feet”, so put that in your translator. backwards… and i’m in! oh, i also got stuff for the store…

• ben franklin used books

  yes, i went to sell books from HBML, that were kind of boring and kind of nice, that i thought no one who came into the store would want. is that so wrong? ben franklin’s is the best bookstore in worcester, and i would say this even if there were another bookstore in worcester. there are cats that roam around, classical music on the radio, lots of art books and a GREAT occult section. working there was my first real job, and the first job i ever quit (but amicably so). times are tough for bookstores, so i didn’t get cash for the books, only credit, which is inideal, but is also a perfect way to engage a quasi-frivlous pleasure in exhaustive monographs and privately-published daemonic encyclopaedias.

• tech pizza

  every tuesday a small pizza in the greek / new england style is $2.50, so every tuesday it’s like montparnasse. well, except that instead of painters it’s skaters and instead of talking about surrealísme they’re talking about how to rationalize a hickey to your mom (consensus: paintball accident). your best drink option is a tall ‘zona from the convience store down the street.

every tuesday errand regimen! you know, it’s the little things?

my move is pretty much complete, although i still need to get my records (which is to say LPs) and i still need to set up my new space (which is something i greatly enjoy). moving was a kind of cake this time, as my previous room system involved keeping pretty much everything in milk crates already. MZ helped me out big time with his dad’s truck, and i paid him with udupi. bosssss.

super big up to long-time pen pal and regular pal leonardr, who got a story published yesterday on futurismic. i was a consultant on this story, in re: glitch metal (which isn’t real, in that it isn’t a named genre, but pretty much is, eg orthrelm).

more when more settled.

UG! i was pissed off all day waiting for some internet strangers to drag this couch out of the shop so i can get things in a better order for incoming volunteers. well they never showed and i lost a day of my life and i missed seeing the syncromaids and now the store is totally torn apart (which i had to do to get the couch out of the back). COOL! they said they could come get it wednesday morning– who wants to go to the store to help them? not me, but it has to get done (which means no one except me will do it).

stormed home in a bad mood hating all life– i was even accidentally at the front of a new year’s eve parade scowling in the TV camera. got home and ate some and watched a little bit of my favorite movie (dracula) and caught the 6:00 fireworks from my front step- the closest i’ve ever seen them. i feel better now but that doesn’t mean everything in my life is suddenly awesome. i wrote a “year in review” but it’s a total downer and one thing i learned this year is that no one wants to know how you’re doing if it’s bad, and people who need people are fucked. there’s no party in worcester because no one in worcester can get their shit together. instead everyone’s going to providence, which i thought would be an escape for me but the other thing i learned is that there’s no escape.

this saturday (the 5th) i’m playing a show at the q, which is the pathetic coffee house on chandler st towards tatnuck square. it’s me, the foundation, and “i hate them”. it’s billed as a dance competition, but i don’t play dance music (and i resent bands telling me to dance). bring your own booze and hide it on your person. i don’t know what time the show’s going to be at but i bet i’m going to play first. this is the place where the guy didn’t know what earl grey was, and the fucking edward gorey ripoff asshole’s pictures are hanging up everywhere.

this wednesday (the 2nd) there’s a show at the go go, with terribles bone zone and black rainbow (erick lyle’s new band). this is going to be the last punk show ever at the go go, because ML’s moving out and after that no punks will ever move in (because it’ll be all people with careers). there’s a show at mr worcester on the 12th, which is the saturday after next– i think the rowdy ones are playing.

i’m in the middle of about a million things right now. today i’m getting ready to go to providence to work a weird job at RISD tomorrow– doing a silk screening demo with j9, scott reber, cybele and mikey knives. i’ve been stressing too much about it but the stressing has been positive- brainstorming what is going to be my demo image to hand out to art school freshman has resulted in a lot of inappropriate (too good) ideas, so look for those on shirts and patches in the next few weeks.

the other thing is that start on the street is this sunday, so i’ve been printing up a ton of the “paris” shirts to get ready for that. hopefully i can also move the rest of the older HBML shirts, so i can feel justified making a new design. i’m also setting up a new website to sell just the paris and turtleboy shirts, hopefully scare up some capital. plus i’m trying to rebuild the store, there’s a fashion show on the 21st, a music show on the 22nd, an art opening sometime around then, and hopefully a trip to the miami art scene with empty mountain after all of this. weird world.

yesterday there was a surprise fundraiser barbecue car wash to raise money to try and get billy blue (#24 on the blues radio charts!) to “go big” and tour europe (where blues audiences are reverential and mellow and profitable). it was a beautiful day, lots of kids flagging down cars and scrubbing them down, good food, wrestling with toddlers, hose fights, airplane rides, half beer half lemonade. afterwards everyone went to a party in providence except me and mel- we stayed home and watched “the sentinel” (the 1977 one), which was totally creepy.

ugh! this site’s been down for a few weeks i guess due to server problems that resulted in a switching of servers which i didn’t have to actually deal with (and good thing)but i did have to wait for (which is nothing new). writing is such a huge part of my learning and remembering process that when i can’t or don’t write, things start to go bad. this time i did ok, though (i think). so what happened in the interim? oh, the weather was nice, i walked around.

• there were a couple shows, enough that i got temporarily sick of shows. i will highlight one- nadir, the dungeoneers, trap them, furnace, and some other band with a basement-themed name, at maniac mansion (in the basement obviously). this was supposed to be the dungeoneers tape release but things didn’t happen in time (as they tend to not), so it was merely “the second-to-last show” (before matt carroll returned from germany and the terribles could continue being a band). nadir played before them and totally destroyed. i know no one likes to be put in a box, but nadir is a grind-oriented band from worcester. guitar drums vocals, and everything is so fast and so tech it’s like watching hummingbirds- all wrist, all twitch. i’ve seen them a couple times and i like it more and more, and more and more they make other bands on the bill look like a bunch of sleepy kittens by comparison. i don’t remember who the third band was- my understanding is that hardcore is now (and has been for some time) driven by a sort of nerd so psyched on specific parts of previous canonical hardcore bands that only nerds can really tell you if a band’s sources are valid and their construction sound, making them good. but no need to hate, as electronic dance music is also driven by specific tempo ranges, lustrous clichés, and precision homage, and that’s still fun (though also not my idiom). anyway, i absolutely had to leave halfway through, as 2.5 bands is my limit in the basement of maniac mansion- all the smoke you know, but mostly it’s the low ceilings that force me into a bad posture which gives me horrible stomach cramps.

• there were these beautiful russians visiting some friend of a friend and we ended up hanging out and talking about music, prisons, hygeine, and the internet. the best part was when one of them asked me why punks didn’t shower and i gave her a brief but thorough breakdown of the ways in which not showering displayed the best of the punk ethos. basically, that being OK with your own body odor is an enourmous step towards being OK with your body; that it is the tantalizing smell of action; that smelling like a person sets one apart in a clear and unfakeable way from the the beauty standards of a possibly large and certainly objectionable set of people who would rather smell like a supermarket aisle, and more in line with the rest of the animal kingdom. the one talkative lady told me i was very funny, and moreover that i “say good things”, which made me really happy and to some degree rescued me from a foggy outlook. she had a weird shirt with a very high moderately floppy collar, long straight black hair with one ear poking through, high elfish cheekbones, and sharp facial features set farther away from each other than might seem reasonable in a planning stage. in short, the sort of person it is simply nice to be amid, like a full-spectrum lightbulb.

• my show at julian’s with adam gnade was really fun- i was really stressed out but all the stress just made me want more and more to get lost in myself and my friends and abandon myself to rogue operators and sing super fucking loud, which is what i did and it worked. also they gave me really good food– i got a side order of asparagus because i’d never buy it for myself, it was delicious.

• went to the art museum two weeks in a row (still free on saturdays before noon), first to see the pettibon / ed ruscha exhibit, then to manage a scavenger hunt for esther and jen.

  • pettibon/ruscha killed. obviously i like both of these guys a ton. ruscha (“ru-SHAY”) for his great boringness, his californiosity, his craft, and for being another great creator in the perambulatory mode (basing his paintings on things overheard while walking around the city). i look at “styrene they called her”, his book of word paintings, at least once a month. pettibon i like for his lineage (black flag duh), his subject matter (scummy hippies, trains, surfers on huge waves), his goony style, his handwriting, his inclusion of texts, and the texts he includes. both i like a lot for their dry wit, and for employing reading as a skill. the show at the art museum was 1/2 about “the end” and 1/2 about “the bible”. i expected their collabs to feature pettibon on the images and ruscha on the texts, but it was actually quite the reverse, and not a disappointment. it’s still at the art museum, i’d really like to hear a review by someone with a black flag tattoo.

  • the scavenger hunt totally ruled, a version of an idea i had a while back regarding my own personal relationship to the worcester art museum (with the ultimate goal of getting others to develop such a relationship as well, and work the paintings of the museum into a local artistic vocabulary). the scavenger hunt featured about 20 items- all pieces in the museum. the clues were jokes about or things i think about or funny things in any of the given paintings- “a lady that is a spaceship”, “a dude, holding”, “a garish and sinister mess from which the only comfort that can be had is tackiness.”. it went great and they got most of them (with a little help). i’ll post the full list of items when i get the sheet back from esther (maybe never).

well, that’s enough of the past off my brainback to allow me some rest. there’s always more, but we are now sufficiently caught up that i can go draw, or make food, or read comic books, or anything, and not feel the weight of recent memory compounding. glad to be back.

busy as two bees even if i’ve been sleeping on the webpage[s]. yes, fuffin’, grubbin’, aw heckin’, nicklin’, dimin’, shuckin’, no noodlin’, no doodlin’; admittedly i’m not full-time destroying like i should be, and somedays i feel like i did nothing at all, but what can you expect from a universe that creates and destroys itself instant to instant?

• tomorrow matt carroll will be at the store from 5-8pm doing mad libs with people in the full guise of a 19th century british naval officer.
• today i did a mess of silkscreening (shirts and patches and finally bandanas (all for the store)) plus i went to the mall with pars, which was heavenly. not that it was great, i mean, every moment with pars is like getting a bottle rocket shot at you (great), but the time at the mall wasn’t especially super wonderful, it was just that, with the colors and lighting and architecture being so weird, and time collapsed in that weird mall way, and people looking so strange and clean, and everyone playing this weird game i can’t exactly discern, and there’s nothing to really do– it’s like a heaven as viewed by a person who for one reason or another has opted out.
• sunday i went down to providence to set up an art show at the
  stairwell gallery, which is haley’s gallery on broadway. the show was great, the theme was “creatures” and i made some new stuffed animals for it (which i showed alongside a select few of the stuffed animals i already made. many heads at the show but i have that thing where i can’t have actual conversations with people in a party setting, i can only say “hey, how’s it going?” and “what have you been up to?” over and over again. plus i was super hungry and frazzled from running late all over (and staying up really late working on the animals last-minute style), so i pretty much just stood in the corner plowing through free sushi but that’s totally OK.

• saturday working on the animals as stated (a la mode) and finally (reverse-finally)
• friday night total sweets party for JK’s birthday. dude is such a sweet tooth he just asked everyone to bring sweets to share, and i flew so high and crashed so fast and hard and with extreme prejudice that it messed me physically and emotionally up for from then until almost now. but if that’s what JK wants that’s what he gets because he’s an angel and what he says goes. my part in the potluck was a first try at “desert dogs”, which entailed frying plantains with brown sugar and putting them in grilled hot dog buns with chocolate syrup. sounds good but i burned the damn things, and i even burned the buns, which should if anything show my commitment to fucking everything up that can be up at all, or to put it another way, the simple ease with which i do everything wrong always and rep it.

oh, plus peter’s back from thailand and taking (indefinite?) time off from school, so take him out for coffee and he’ll tell you about going to a rave in a jungle. he came to worcester this weekend and totally creased my dome, wearing a lime green t-shirt with a flaccid anthropomorphic phallus on fire printed on the collarbone. you think he’s set for zig, he zags- psibs for emperor!

drawing at MZ’s house last night while he worked on the zombie painting he’s been working on for months now. obviously i could never do that- i can barely wait for paint to dry. the other thing i realized i can’t do is let a drawing sit in my sketchbook- almost everything i ever draw ends up getting used in something nowadays. and even backwards through history, as i’ve been raiding old sketchbooks for pictures (and lyrics).

the other day i won a business card raffle for a free lunch at the broadway, for me and 15 friends. we had to sit through this 5 minute sales presentation about financial planning, but it was worth it. i kept getting the feeling that we were scamming this dude, but in fact we were telling totally the truth. i do run a record label, we are all in bands, this is our careers.

closed the store early today because it’s snowing like a MF, and i cancelled tonight’s event too- matt carroll in 19th century british naval character doing mad libs with store denizens. or should i say, i rescheduled. stop in wednesday 5 - 8pm and get a dose. BYO nouns, verbs, etc.. ok, i have to not fritter away this snow day like i have done almost every other snow day in my long life, i have actual things to do right now, things that before the storm i was hair-tearing about not having the time for. lots of sewing, some silk screening, listening to the new uke of spaces corners LP. ok, the USC LP came fresh in the mail yesterday from somewhere in dan beckmanistan, alongside the uke of… / erin tobey “on the phone” split. i listened to the tape at the store, it rules so hard, and you can listen to both individual sets online via the “phoning it in” webpage, alongside other epic nods like BARR, daniel higgs, jana hunter, jad fair, daniel johnston, microphones/mt eerie, thanksgiving, mountain goats, jolie holland… EPIC!!!!! nadav you’re the king of the air and the wire and the other wire (which is a system of wires). i’ll have a set for you soon ok?

well, shit, it sure has been nice out these past few days. yes, it’s been so nice i upgraded from “gee whiz” to “well, shit”. today i walked around visiting and enjoying, and remembering the merits of spending an hour outside among people every day (classic cometbus advice). at one point a mildly wasted and ruddy man, steady mobbing his way up the street, looked at me as shouted “how’s it going, brother?”. i told him quite honestly that things were going pretty good, and then thought, “i am this man’s brother!”. also today i told one of my favorite lies, one so good i almost believe it every time. it’s really the popcorn of lies: “while you were gone [x] punched [y] in the belly and [y]’s pants fell down and [y] wasn’t wearing underwear”.

tomorrow i film a music video and do the laundry, but not at the same time (probably).

oh yeah, and james mcshane has a new drawing blog, here’s a picture:

dude always kills it!

my art show yesterday was a total success, in that a bunch of people came and hung out at the store, i had a reason to do a mess of paintings (all of which i’m quite pleased with, except for the ones i’m not pleased with, which i threw away), plus i had the motivation to clean up and reorganize the store, and now there’s both more room and more stuff and it looks better. and there were cookies and suicide soda, as promised. commemorative handkerchiefs had to wait, though, as the thread count was too low to print on if you can believe it. i’m trying to have at least one new product (by me) every week now, and i’d really like to have weekly events too (although i have no plan for next week).

well, i finally got that new power cord, so my computer is again operational. now i’m trying to figure out how to integrate that midi controller i finally caved in and bought this week, the one that’s all knobs and faders (the uc-33). once i get that down, phone book is back. but right now i’m having trouble and the only stuff i find online talks about how easy it is to use but offers no actual help. bah!

today i gave a truncated version of my dracula lecture at a high school where a friend of mine works. she told me a lot of her students are into vampires and stuff, and it was troubling some of the staff, but she wanted to cast it in a positive light, so there i was. i was worried at first about rambling, but pretty soon it turned into a Q & A free-for-all, which was fun. i was treated as “an expert” on the subject of monsters. one kid (in an indiana jones hat and mirror shades) kept trying to call me on my shit w/r/t what would ACTUALLY happen were a vampire to bite a werewolf, not picking up my freedom mythology “nothing is true everything is permitted” vibe. totally fun. great eyes lit up when i mentioned metal (the genre, not the type of matter), suicidal tendencies (the band, not the actual tendency), and when i casually said “shit”. i guess my dream is that some of the kids took a slightly different “anything goes” look on culture and learning, but most likely i’ll just be the guy that started everyone saying the word “fecund”. anyway, like i said, it was fun. esther, i did record it, but rather than put the recording online, i think i’m going to try to distill it down to the choice nuggets and the important things surrounding these nuggets that i wished i had said. so look for essays on topics like “approaches to mythology up to and including leatherface”, “gleeful violence”, and “‘fuck’: a cool word to use”, in the next interview witha frankenstein (in other words, never). anyway, thanks PKP! and thanks esther for making me a brown bag lunch– totally cute…

more thanks– working at the store today was totally fun, so, thanks chillers!

today i did some errands, and on the way home ran into nik perry and jess VW in the street, and went with them adventuring. well, shopping. first we went to the mid towne mall to look at bling chains and the like. when yelled at by some sort of manager for trying to go upstairs, i did what i like to do in those situations, transition from my “hoodlum” identity to my “businessman” identity. for what it’s worth, spaces there start at $250 a month- pretty decent. so who will challenge my “fucked store” monopoly?

from the MTM we went to building 19 where i got a lot of great stuff- the second and third volumes of remembrances of things past, a video featuring “scatman crothers as beethoven”, a bunch of colorful fishing lures, many empty coconut halves, and a dvd of 2 italian “sword and sandal” movies starring steve reeves. again, italy. maybe i’m off-base, but my understanding of why italian shit kills it is that, in certain influential situations, economics forced italian players to early-adopt cheap technologies and easy approaches to content that later became standard, but to rep them with the jubilant spirit of the times (whatever times those might be) rather than the “this is what we’ve been reduced to” vibe of later losers. thus the way-fun futuristic sound of italo disco was borne of being unable to import american disco records, not having the money to hire a swirling violin section, doing everything 100% on keyboards, and never knowing any other way. similarly steve reeves movies are 100% OK with letting a weird physique alone drive a franchise. or maybe this is just something i’ve been thinking about a lot lately. anyway, what next, italy?